What Is a Backlink? How Links Boost Your Site’s Credibility

A great-looking website and fantastic content are only useful if people can find your site. Over 28% of people using Google click on the top result, with nearly 70% of clicks going to the top five sites. With this in mind, it’s clear that you need to be at the top of the pile. 

With lots of competition in the search engine results pages (SERPs), pushing your site to that top spot isn’t easy, and you won’t just get there with carefully placed keywords. One of the best ways to boost your position is with backlinks. But what is a backlink?

Here’s how you can improve your site’s credibility by acquiring backlinks. 

What Is a Backlink?

Backlinks, also known as “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are links on other websites that point to your website. These links play a crucial role in determining the popularity and authority of a website and are one of the most important ranking factors used by search engines like Google.

When one website links to another, it is essentially “vouching” for the linked content and recommending it to its visitors. As a result, search engines interpret these backlinks as a sign of trust and credibility, and the more backlinks a website has, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its industry.

There are several different types of backlinks, including

• Natural backlinks: These are links that are gained organically through the content on your website. For example, if you write a blog post that is particularly informative or interesting, other websites may link to it without you having to ask them to.
• Self-created backlinks: These are links you create yourself, either by commenting on other websites or submitting your website to directories and other online resources.
• Paid backlinks: These are links you pay for, either by buying advertising space on other websites or paying other websites to link to your website.

What Is Domain Authority?

One term you may often hear in search engine optimisation is “domain authority”. This is a metric devised by Moz.com that looks at several ranking factors and gives a site a score between 0-100. 

Although other metrics are available, domain authority is widely used. 

One of the critical factors Moz use to score a site is backlinks. But it’s not just about the number of backlinks pointing to a site. If that were the case, this site would do much better as it has thousands of backlinks. The quality of the backlink comes into play too. 

How Do You Know If a Backlink Is Good?

It’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal. Search engines like Google place more weight on backlinks from websites that are considered authoritative and trustworthy, such as government websites, educational websites, and well-established media outlets. 

Backlinks from low-quality websites or “link farms” can hurt your search engine rankings, so be selective about the websites you use.

It’s important to note that buying or selling links to manipulate search engine rankings is against Google’s guidelines and can result in penalties such as a lower ranking position. In some cases, Google may ban your website from the search engine altogether.

How Do You Get Backlinks?

Okay, so many website owners face the age-old problem of how to acquire links. As mentioned, you could pay for someone to build links for you. This usually involves them getting websites to insert links into new or existing websites. There are lots of SEO companies that will do this kind of work at scale, meaning you quickly get hundreds of links to your site. 

But these links don’t always work, and you could get penalised. 

Link-Worthy Content Creation

To get natural links, the best thing to do is invest in quality content that’s original, well-written, and of value to readers. This kind of content is more likely to pick up links naturally. 

Skyscraper content is more likely to get good-quality backlinks. This is particularly thorough content that goes in-depth into a topic. Sometimes, these articles run at thousands of words but are invaluable resources that bloggers will repeatedly link to. 

Elsewhere in this article, you may have noticed that there have been outbound links to ‘Search Engine Journal’. As a leading resource on all things SEO, this site often acquires natural links. By virtue of this, it ranks well in the SERPs. 

Free Listing Sites

Free listing sites are a great place to get links. If you run a business, listing it on sites like “Yell” can help you boost your domain authority. This may feel like an uphill task, but the links you’ll acquire are usually on websites with good domain authority and low spam scores. 

Guest Post

Guest posting is a great way to build credibility. Talk with other website owners and ask if you can share posts on their sites. You may have noticed that this site often shares posts from guest writers. 

It’s widely accepted that when you’re providing a guest post for another site, you can share a link to your content. This is best placed naturally within the flow of the article; however, you may want to add it to a bio to share alongside the content. 

Many website owners hire professional content writers to create guest posts on their behalf. Remember, although the content isn’t on your site, it should still be of good quality. 

Find Broken Links

When you add a link to your site, you have no control over whether the page you’re linking to will remain live forever. Some site owners regularly move or remove content, and websites close down all the time. When a linked site is no longer live, it leaves you with a broken link.

Lots of sites have broken links, and they’re not great for user experience. Nobody wants dead ends in their content, so most website owners will want to replace these links. Often, they may not know the link is broken. 

One way to get backlinks is to spot broken links on other people’s sites and propose they send their visitors to relevant or similar content on your site. 

Blog Comments

Commenting on blog posts on other sites can also increase your backlinks. But proceed with caution here. You’ll need to ensure that your comments are relevant, welcome, and not seen as spam. 

Most site owners use plugins like Askimet; your comment might get caught in the spam filter, or you could annoy the site owner, and they’ll manually remove your comment themselves. 

Infographics

Lots of bloggers like to share infographics that illustrate their points with striking visuals. If you’re great at making facts stand out visually, you could create an infographic that site owners could use to add value to their content.

When sharing infographics, the site owner will credit you with a link. 

Get Journalistic Backlinks

Newspapers often have very popular websites with good domain authority scores. With high reader numbers, getting linked to journalistic content is a great way to boost your site’s credibility. 

HARO is a tool to match reporters with sources. Sign up as a source and look out for opportunities to share your industry expertise with journalists who are writing on that topic. In exchange for your insights, you’ll get a backlink. 

Provide Testimonials for Other Businesses

If you’ve used the services of another business, they might appreciate a testimonial from you for their website. Testimonials are a great way to build social proof, but you can also get a backlink to your site simultaneously. 

What Should I Do If I Get Bad Backlinks?

Spammy backlinks can have a negative impact on your site’s rankings. In some cases, they could lead to Google taking manual action against your site — impacting your search appearance. 

But often, these bad backlinks are not ones that you’ve sought to acquire yourself. So, how do you know they are there?

The best thing to do is use a tool like Google Search Console to look at your links. Look for odd-looking URLs that contain a mixture of numbers and letters which repeatedly link to your site. Often these domains are overseas in countries like China or Russia. 

Once you’ve identified a bad backlink, you have two options. You can either approach the webmaster and ask them to remove that link, or you can disavow it. 

Emailing a spammy website and politely asking them to remove a link is probably a huge waste of your time and energy and is unlikely to yield results. Instead, what you should do is list the spammy links in a spreadsheet, head over to Google’s Disavow Tool and copy in the list of spam URLs. 

Boost Your Site’s Credibility

So, what is a backlink? Put simply, backlinks are a crucial factor in determining a website’s popularity and authority and play a major role in search engine rankings. 

By creating quality content and using link-building techniques, you can increase the number of backlinks to your website, which can ultimately drive more traffic and improve your search engine rankings.

Need help with content creation or want to boost your site’s credibility through guest posting? Get in touch today to discuss how I can help.